He bowed his head lightly in farewell, and took one sweeping step away…perhaps behind a boulder, perhaps into thin air. He was gone.
“What does that mean?” Ben said.
Thea realized to her horror that she was about to cry. “He means we may need to destroy Diego,” she whispered. “That…I…may have to…”
Magpie reached over and took her hand, squeezing her fingers. She said nothing. Ben kept his own eyes down, staring at the laced fingers of his hands.
“You heard him,” Terry said, after a pause. “What we need to do, we need to do now. And you need to come up with a good lure.”
“Even if he’s gone with the Alphiri?”
“Especially then,” Tess said gently.
“Will they let you back into the school?” Ben asked out of nowhere, suddenly lifting his eyes and skewering Thea with a challenging look.
“What?” she said, blindsided by the question.
“Well, more and more people actually know about you now,” Ben said. “And that school was built upon the no-magic rule. What if they don’t take you back next semester?”
“Not now, Ben,” Magpie murmured. “Thea…they’re right. We need to figure out what to do—if it’s nothing, then it’s nothing. But if you hang back…then the Whale Hunt might be worthless, and Twitterpat and all those others died for no reason at all, and we’ve lost a war we didn’t even know we were fighting.”
“I know what you did last summer,” Thea whispered.
“What?” Terry said, staring.
“That,” Thea said. “Send that. Make it look like a spellspam, fudge the addresses and all that…but make sure it’s really aimed at him alone, at Diego. We all know how to target a spell.”
“In theory,” Tess said.
“Can you do that?” Magpie asked, turning to Terry.
“It will bring him?” he asked, speaking directly to Thea across the flames.
“It will,” she said.
“Then I can do it,” he said, hoisting himself to his feet. “Let’s go.”
To: [email protected]
From: Reddy O’Nott < [email protected] >
Subject: invisible
Nobody will ever see you again…
1.
IT DID NOT TAKE Diego de los Reyes long to respond to the spellspam message. Terry’s suspicions that Diego had somehow left himself with a back door onto the Terranet through the Nexus gateways seemed to be well-founded—even with the Nexus in Professor de los Reyes’s study offline, a “you’ve got mail” ping on her laptop got Thea’s attention less than an hour after she and the twins returned to Terry’s room, after restoring Ben and Magpie to the places from which they had been plucked for the visit to Cheveyo.
“It’s him,” she said in a low voice.
“That isn’t possible, not that fast, not without a connection,” Terry muttered. “Gimme that computer.”
Thea passed the laptop over without a word. Terry scanned the screen, first with the aid of Grandmother Spider’s dreamcatcher and then without; he frowned, pressed a few keys, things shifted quickly from one piece of software to another. “Where is it?” Terry asked finally, more fascinated than frustrated. “I can’t find it. It isn’t in your inbox, and I can’t even get at the server to see what’s on that, we aren’t online—where is it?”
Thea retrieved the laptop, poked at a few keys herself. The screen blinked, and went an odd shade of gray-green, with two lines of bold black letters in the middle of it.
“Right there,” she said.
“What?” Terry said, sounding mystified, turning the computer to face him again and staring at it in blank incomprehension. “Where?”
Thea sat back on her heels, staring at Terry over the top of the screen. “You can’t even see it, can you?” she said. “It’s for me. Just for me. To everyone else, it’s not even there…”
Terry and Thea stared at each other, holding the computer sitting balanced between them with one hand each. “Well…?” Tess asked. “What does it say?”
Thea turned the computer toward herself again and read the message out loud that only she could see. “It isn’t what I have done. It is what I will still do.”
“It sounds as though he’s planning to go with the Alphiri,” Tess said.
“It sounds as though he’s already gone with the Alphiri,” Terry said grimly. “Are we too late, Thea?”
“Maybe not,” Thea said. “Terry, can you trace where this thing is…You can’t even see it. How are you to trace it? But that’s where he is, where he sent this thing to me from. I need to—yikes!”
She reached out as she spoke to touch the screen of the laptop with an outstretched finger, and the yelp came when her finger simply sank into the screen rather than coming into physical contact with its solid surface. She snatched her hand back.
“What was that?” Terry said, staring.
But Thea was far away, remembering, standing once again with Grandmother Spider before a portal she had raised with her own hands, woven from starlight and memory and a haunting piece of music. The portal had shown her a way to go home, which she had used to spring a trap, pushing Corey the Trickster into the arms of the Alphiri, who had been lying in wait for her.
But Diego de los Reyes didn’t know about that portal.
Corey did, of course. Corey was the only one who could have told Diego about it; if Diego was anything like Thea herself, the rest would have come naturally, like water gushing when an obstacle to its passage was suddenly removed.
But if this had the stamp of Corey’s involvement, was it to be trusted?
What choice do I have?
Thea stirred. “It’s a way in. A way straight to him. That’s what we wanted, wasn’t it?”
Terry and Tess exchanged frightened looks. Thea knew she sounded distant, detached, almost completely dispassionate—this was the goal they had been working toward, after all, and here was a means to achieve it. And all of a sudden there was no way forward except through that screen—and she recognized the color now; she had seen it before. It was a slightly corrupted shade of the green with which Diego veiled his abode.
Thea drew the laptop back toward herself, and for a moment Terry tightened his grip on it, but then he released it with an explosive little sigh. Thea laid it on the ground before her, very carefully, and then laid both hands lightly on the sides of the screen.
“I can see it reflected on your face,” Tess said suddenly. “There’s a light…”
“But there was nothing on screen,” said Terry obstinately. “Nothing that I could point to—”
“It’s okay,” Thea said. “It’s what we wanted, it’s a path, and I’m taking it.”
“Thea, no—”
“We need to—”
The twins both spoke at once, both reaching for the computer, but Thea had already slipped her hands down and onto the screen—into the screen.
“Tell them I’ll try,” she said, and let the portal pull her through, arms sinking in to the elbows, then the shoulders, and then she shut her eyes as the light dimmed and greened around her. A single word echoed behind her, following her—Wait…
But then it was gone. And she stood back in the obsidian and green space where she had been before, Diego’s place, stark in its painful simplicity. It was something he seemed to cling to, reluctant to exchange it for anything more complex, anything that he could not control, that wasn’t familiar. For some reason that gave Thea an odd pang of something almost like hope—could a creature like Diego be useful to the Alphiri in the way that they wanted—without leaving this cocoon? And what if he wouldn’t do it? What if he couldn’t do it?
“Where are you?” she said, standing very still in the midst of the obsidian floor. She had to force herself to speak in a natural voice, not to whisper.
“Right here, of course. Where you expected me to be,” said Diego’s voice.
Thea had recognized this place instantly as she had stepped through into it, but
there had also been something subtly different about it. She could not have said precisely what had triggered that instinct, but now it was Diego’s voice that brought it into focus—as Diego himself stepped out of the shadows, matching action to words. He appeared to do so in a dozen fractured frames at once, as though coming at Thea from every angle and every direction.
Mirrors. The place was full of mirrors. Mirrors opposite one another, mirrors at an angle, like a carnival funhouse, and a black-breeched, white-shirted, dark-eyed Diego in all of them at once, smiling.
“What are you hiding from?” Thea said, looking into one mirror after another, trying to figure out where the original was standing and which of the myriad of Diegos were just shadow and reflection.
“Hiding? I don’t need to hide,” Diego said. “Your message was irrelevant—everybody already knows what I have done this summer. And they’re the ones who are afraid, not me.”
“If you weren’t, you would not need the mirrors,” Thea said. “Or do you just like what you see so much that you can’t get enough of yourself?”
It was a deliberate barb, and it worked, after a fashion. Diego snorted in disdain and somehow stepped out of his mirror maze, standing so that only two mirrors now reflected him, one from behind, one in profile. But he, himself, now stood solid, real enough for the ghost that he was, staring at Thea in challenge.
“I could have had company,” Diego said. “In fact, I did, such as it was.”
“You count Corey as company?”
“Well, he was here, wasn’t he?” Diego said. “And he’s far more entertaining than you appear to give him credit for.”
“It isn’t his entertainment value that I was questioning,” Thea said.
“Yeah, well. Trust is relative. But that wasn’t what I was talking about—I had the whole world to play with, didn’t I? Until you interfered, that is. But—always excepting my tutor—that world stayed out there. For the most part…there’s nobody here, in this place, to look at except me. Shadows are empty things, and silent. A guy could get awfully tired just being by himself.”
“But you found out that you could communicate,” Thea said. “And once you discovered that…why not something other than your games? Once you got into the computer, found your voice, learned how to make yourself heard through the wires—why didn’t you make yourself known to them? You made the whole world dance to your tune, and you couldn’t reach out to your own family?”
Diego’s hands clenched suddenly. “They never wanted me. My father never cared,” he lashed out. And then, turning a darkly malicious gaze on Thea, added silkily, “I didn’t have the benefit of your family background. I was not an eagerly expected prodigy to be groomed for greatness. I never existed, remember?”
Thea suddenly remembered her own brothers—the complicated mess of family, from Anthony’s superior putdowns to Frankie’s disastrous attempts to measure up to the family standards—the bickering and the scuffles and the teasing, but also the way she knew that she could have counted on any of them to help if she ever needed them. She might sometimes chafe at the rough edges of her own little spot in the universe, but she had one, connected to those she loved and who loved her with a thousand delicate strands. Woven—she was woven into her world, into all of her worlds, a part of its fabric.
Diego saw her smile, and misinterpreted it.
“I thought that we were alike, when I first crossed your path,” he said tightly, through clenched teeth. “But they’ve got you bound up tight; you’re daddy’s girl after all, trying to do well, taking it back home for the family to take pride in, to give you a reward when you’ve learned to perform some trick like a well-trained performing seal…”
“And all you see is the reward?” Thea said, her voice sharp. It had been a while, but she had not forgotten, could not forget, the barren years, the carefully hidden despair that once coiled at the heart of her family like a serpent. “You think being alone is a heavy burden? There were times I would have rather been an orphan than bring home yet another failure to lay at my father’s feet. You have never felt the weight of disappointed love or of failing to live up to expectations. The only thing you’ve ever been is lonely by yourself—you have no idea how desperate it is to be lonely in the midst of people who love you, and whom you would have done anything to make happy…”
“I have always been free,” said Diego softly.
The mirror behind him suddenly changed, and instead of reflecting a human shape, it was showing blue sky flecked with white clouds, and an eagle that wheeled with its magnificent wings outspread, screaming its defiance.
Thea responded with pure instinct. She reached out and did something…and the second mirror swiftly changed to respond—and the image was the same eagle, wings furled, head bent and covered with a leather hood that rendered it blind and docile, jesses attached to its legs, sitting on the gloved forearm while another hand, ungloved, stroked the back of the bird’s furled wings with a possessive gesture of long, pale Alphiri fingers.
Diego’s own mirror blinked into dimness; the bird in the Alphiri hand suddenly roused.
“You don’t know what they offered me!” he cried out, as the hooded bird on the Alphiri’s hand opened its beak and screamed.
The other hand in the image had disappeared as the bird stirred; now Thea brought it back into the picture, holding a piece of bloody meat, which it held out to the hooded eagle, just out of reach.
“That,” Thea said. “Only that. Bait, lures. They remain the hunters, the ones who are in control. And your prey would be us.”
Other mirrors woke into light, a confusion of images—eagles, a glimpse of crystal spires, echoes of the laughter of human children as though the mirrors could transmit sound as well as visual images; Thea suddenly realized why it was nagging at her, why it was so familiar.
She had done this before. Images from her mind, a childhood memory, coming to life in a mirror…
“It’s like a true dreamcatcher,” she whispered, staring at Diego’s mirror. “Like one of Grandmother Spider’s dreamcatchers. You can turn it in or out, send or see, that’s how you got to me even without the computer…but if you had this…why did you risk Beltran…why bother using the Nexus?” And then she put the pieces together, and her blood ran cold at the thought. “The Alphiri,” she whispered. “You’ve already made that bargain, haven’t you? They gave you this…They…but they had no true dreamcatchers…Grandmother Spider said she never sold them the real secret…they…Corey stole it…”
“I don’t need you, any of you, not anymore,” Diego said, and he had stepped back into the mirror maze, which reflected back a frightening mix of young man and raptor, human limbs and eagle eyes, a bird’s foot with razor-sharp talons reaching out to draw a glove off a human hand. “I have all I need now. And all I ever needed was me.”
“You’re wrong,” Thea said, desperate. She had spoken of her own burdens, but now, in the face of the mirrored world, they were the anchors that held her to her own existence, her own sense of reality. They were part of her, part of what made her alive…“None of it is real, Diego. None of it can ever be real—you have never known the reality, not directly, you don’t have the memories—all of it’s been stolen, or made up—none of it is true…”
But even as she spoke, she realized that something else was happening, that a part of her was still attuned to the dreamcatcher, she had touched one long before Diego had. There suddenly seemed to be more and more mirrors, and it seemed that some of them were from her own mind. Diego seemed to be receding from her, into a welter of color and shape that started to blur, shifting and changing like a kaleidoscope.
Too much, too fast, too powerful—she was being bombarded by a sensory overload, an avalanche of sight and sound and memory. Words wove themselves into her consciousness like she wove light on Cheveyo’s mesas—sometimes there’s nobody here to look at except me—mirrors…reflections…the catchers of dreams…
For a moment Thea was seve
n years old again, shrieking with delight, seated on a painted carousel pony with a tiny crown between its ears and bright jewel-like crystals set in its bridle. Everything else was a blur, except that too-sharp vision of the bright pony and its sparkling gems—and the flash and shimmer of mirrors on the central column of the merry-go-round as she rode past them, again and again, round and round. She found herself adding mirrors, more each time, reflecting the reflections of reflections, until the world was a vivid jewel of flame.
There’s nobody to look at except me.
The mirrors. They gave Diego the illusion of not being alone—always, but only the illusion of it. He had sold his gift and his potential for a lie, a fantasy, a thing of mist and shadows that would have dissolved sooner or later, or possibly as soon as he had performed whatever service the Alphiri had had in mind. Thea focused on the thought that Diego had been lonely enough to accept that as a substitute for real companionship—and seemed to be willing to do that indefinitely. That he had considered this a fair trade.
But a bargain was a bargain—and the Alphiri could hold all of the human polity to ransom…
No.
Zoë had said it. Diego belonged to nobody. Nobody could bargain for him except himself. Nobody else could be held responsible for this bargain.
Mirrors.
Mirrors were a way out. They were also a prison. With enough mirrors, there would be only illusion—only and ever illusion—but never a road out to reality. But they had to face within.…
Thea recoiled even as the thought came to her. She could turn the mirrors. Turn them into a trap. Take the very thing that Diego had sold his soul to get—that illusion of not being alone—and use it to seal him into a living tomb where the illusion would be all he had, all he would ever have. These mirrors were real magic—a true dreamcatcher of the First World, the kind Grandmother Spider used to weave the threads of fortune for all the other worlds that spilled out in the First World’s shadow. As long as Diego believed in what he wanted to see, he would continue to see it, vividly, brightly, unfaded as the days slipped by—but what he saw would still be just illusion. And in time…in the merciless passing of years and decades and maybe centuries…the mind would tire, and the focus would weaken, and the world of illusion would grow dark. Sealed within would be that thing that Aunt Zoë had called a lost soul, forever sundered from any true companionship with his own kind.
Worldweavers: Spellspam Page 25